Year: 2008

MooseCamp 2008

Anoth­er nice Fri­day in Feb­ru­ary for Moose­Camp; some­how the Moose­Camp day man­aged to score nice weath­er two years in a row. This year’s Moose­Camp was big­ger than pre­vi­ous years, and I think we’re get­ting to the lim­it of how many people we can take without los­ing some­thing. We also seem to be get­ting a lot more people who are inter­ested more in com­mer­cial aspects of blog­ging and social media than the per­son­al side, so I’m not sure how that’s going to play out in the future either.

I spent much of the morn­ing on the t‑shirt and regis­tra­tion desk until things settled down, then went to the mul­ti­lin­gual ses­sion, mostly since I occa­sion­ally won­der wheth­er (I should try blog­ging in Ger­man as well as Eng­lish. There were quite a few people in the room, but it turned out that only two of us were inter­ested in the sub­ject for a per­son­al blog; every­one else was inter­ested in the sub­ject for a cli­ent, or for their com­pany. Which isn’t bad, and I’m sure the oth­er people in the room were glad to know that sev­er­al oth­ers were inter­ested in the cor­por­ate aspects of the sub­ject, it was just of less interest to me personally. 

Pho­tocamp took the first part of the after­noon; inter­est­ing as always and some decent tips on light­ing, even for the few of us who use little pock­et cam­er­as (there were some ser­i­ously big cam­er­as on show).

I spoke in the last part of the inter­net boot­camp. The talk I’d pre­pared was meant, in good uncon­fer­ence fash­ion, to be reas­on­ably inter­act­ive. James agreed to help out, since he also found the top­ic inter­est­ing: What Next? The idea was to talk to people who’d been blog­ging for a little while and wanted to take their blog to the next level; I was primed with top­ics such as broad­en­ing the focus versus nar­row­ing it, how the tone and style of blogs tend to devel­op, what effect incor­por­at­ing work top­ics often has, mul­tiple blogs versus one blog on mul­tiple top­ics. A few minutes in it became really obvi­ous that people wer­en’t inter­ested in the sub­ject, and when I asked why they were there, almost all were inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how their com­pany should start blog­ging, or make their com­pany blogs more effect­ive. So in even bet­ter uncon­fer­ence style, I changed the sub­ject and star­ted talk­ing about how Sun had imple­men­ted blog­ging. Most people seemed much hap­pi­er with that sub­ject, and we dis­cussed a lot of related issues. For­tu­nately it was the last ses­sion of the day so the fact we then went over time did­n’t seem to upset too many people. 

Retreating Fibre

I went to my first fibre retreat ever over the week­end (actu­ally, a four-day week­end, includ­ing Valentine’s Day, which struck me as iron­ic). The organ­isers of the retreat did a great job, giv­en that the hotel was being ren­ov­ated, with some of the res­taur­ants and pub­lic spaces closed, and work­ers crawl­ing over much of the rest of the hotel’s pub­lic spaces. It was run just like a tutori­al-style con­fer­ence, with three-hour classes where the instruct­or talked a bit, showed a tech­nique (for tech­nique classes) or samples of end res­ults (for the artist­ic ideas classes), and then got you to try it out while they came around and helped. There were lots of tables set up for inform­al get-togeth­ers, out­side the classrooms and the marketplace. 

The dif­fer­ences to tech con­fer­ences were obvi­ous — not a laptop to be seen, although I’m sure some people went back to their hotel rooms at the breaks to blog or check email, giv­en that many people appeared to work at loc­al tech­no­logy com­pan­ies, and the male/female ratio was even more skewed than for most tech con­fer­ences (I saw about five men at the retreat, out of about 200). The mar­ket­place was busy selling as well as show­ing (unlike exhib­it halls at most tech con­fer­ences), though the vendors looked just as exhausted by the end of the four days as I can remem­ber being after long days on the booth at any oth­er conference.

I learnt a lot (I’ll post more details of the knit­ting high­lights on my craft­ing blog), saw a bit of Tacoma (where the retreat was held), met a few people, and hung out a lot with Eve and Yvonne. Culin­ary high­lights included a yummy din­ner at Wild Ginger where we downed a good bottle of cham­pagne (Inflor­es­cence Blanc de Noirs brut, 100% pinot noir, from Jean-Pierre Bouchard and Cédric Bouchard), Eve’s home-made bore­kas, and a good quick tagine, which I’ll be mak­ing again. 

I’m slowly catch­ing up on sleep; just like any con­fer­ence it was pretty intense and was both invig­or­at­ing and exhaust­ing at the same time. 

Twitters

I’ve been try­ing to post a little more to Twit­ter, not that I’m brave enough to have a pub­lic feed des­pite the non-inter­est­ing tone of my twit­ters (yes, I know they’re meant to be called tweets, but twit­ters sounds more appro­pri­ate to me some­how). And then I noticed some­thing trundling by on the pub­lic feed and clicked on it. It’s the Sydney (Aus­tralia) traffic report, in twit­ter format, which I think is a great idea! sydneytraffic, pulled togeth­er by someone who calls him­self Adam. Are there oth­er use­ful twit­ter streams like this out there? 

Energy Deprivation and NorthernVoice

There’s some­thing about these grey gloomy days that saps my energy. I’m still here, just not blog­ging much. I do post occa­sion­ally to my craft­ing blog, that seems easi­er some­how than this “main” blog. I’ll have to think about what that says about my blog­ging right now. I’m hop­ing that going to the North­ern Voice con­fer­ence at the end of next week brings back some of my blog­ging energy.

Oh, if you were think­ing about attend­ing that con­fer­ence, and haven’t yet registered, you’re too late. We have a couple of spots left for Moose­Camp on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 22nd (which is when I’m speak­ing, in the Inter­net Boot­camp), but the Sat­urday con­fer­ence is full. The sched­ule is look­ing great, we don’t have to trek across cam­pus in the rain for lunch like last year, since lunch is provided, and I got my flu shot already in case the dreaded lurgy strikes again. So I’m all pre­pared. Except, of course, for my talk, but I’ve got over a week to get ready for that.

And it’s only Thursday

I sure hope this week is a one-off. Noth­ing major, no life-threat­en­ing issues, just a bunch of annoy­ing smal­ler things that all came at once. While Tim’s away. 

Monday: go to drive Tim to the air­port; he’s away until Fri­day. The oil sensor light comes on in the car. Tim gets a cab, and I get to take the car to the work­shop. They prom­ise to look at it Tues­day morn­ing. The 19-month-old decides to have a party in her crib at 3 am, wak­ing me (of course). She gets back to sleep even­tu­ally, I lie there think­ing of what needs to be done.

Tues­day: the work­shop looks at the car, changes the oil sensor, changes the oil, the sensor light still comes on, they want to keep it until Wed­nes­day to do some fur­ther tests. The 19-month old only wakes twice dur­ing the night, so that’s not too bad, but then she wants to get up at 6:30 am.

Wed­nes­day: the prob­lem isn’t the oil sensor, it looks like it’s the instru­ment cluster. Which needs to be fixed at an “author­ized deal­er”, since they’re the only ones with all the secur­ity codes and appar­at­us to pro­gram the elec­tron­ics. So I get the car back, can still drive it short dis­tances (great ser­vice from the work­shop, BTW, and a reas­on­able price), such as to the author­ized deal­er. Whose first appoint­ment isn’t until Feb­ru­ary 4th, that’s almost two weeks from now. The 19-month-old fig­ures out how to take off her sleep bag in the middle of the night, gets cold, needs to have the sleep bag and blankets put back on her so she can sleep. Guess I’m not using that sleep bag for her any more. For­tu­nately she sleeps in till 7:30 am.

Thursday: cold, frosty, but sunny. The toi­let clogs. Badly enough that I can­’t get it unclogged, and I’m cur­rently wait­ing on a call back from the plumber. 

I sure hope the rest of the week goes better.

Banks and Firebug

I had a prob­lem with online bank­ing; every time it got to the sec­ond­ary pass­word check on the login screen the whole browser froze. Com­pletely. Leav­ing it to sort itself out did­n’t help. And the bank had no idea; they just said “we’ve tested on Fire­fox on Win­dows XP, it works for us”. And it prob­ably did. Even­tu­ally I got sick of hav­ing to use anoth­er browser and tried the old debug­ging standby of turn­ing off all the exten­sions and add-ons. Lo and behold, it was some prob­lem when Fire­bug was act­ive. Not a big issue, just an annoy­ing one. Not annoy­ing enough to run around fil­ing bug reports every­where, but some­thing to keep in the back of my mind (and on this blog) for future reference.